Hacker Cinema
Raintree County
1957 · Film · 188 min
Directed by Edward Dmytryk
In 1859, idealist John Wickliff Shawnessey, a resident of Raintree County, Indiana, is distracted from his high school sweetheart Nell Gaither by Susanna Drake, a rich New Orleans girl. This love triangle is further complicated by the American Civil War, and dark family history.
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It is hardly news that American (and, to a smaller extent, European) reading tends to revolve around disposable media events. Specific books are announced, promoted, celebrated at launch parties, paraded on semi-arbitrary bestseller lists[1], advertised with author appearances, and then retired and forgotten just as quickly. Do you remember when you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a volume in the endless Left Behind series?
A lot of people I've talked to in the US enjoy specific books, to a large extent, because they are read by lots of other people at the same time. The spectacle gives the reader a sense of affirmation that the choice was a good one, and for a subset of book genres, wide readership is what allows a fandom to coalesce.
In this setting, an old and unpopular book is bad, because no one else is shipping Bjornstjerne Bjornson characters. It's almost as weird as going back to watch old baseball games.
But if that's not how and why you read, yeah, there are thousands upon thousands of wonderful and unusual books that will narrate a corner of human experience that you've never thought about before.
As an anecdote, Raintree County, a 19th-century family saga set in a fictional Southern town, was a cause celebré when it came out in 1948. The movie rights to it were sold before the novel was even published, and the eventual film won the best picture Oscar, beating out Gone with the Wind! Talk about changing tastes!
[1] e.g., https://observer.com/2016/02/the-truth-about-the-new-york-times-and-wall-street-journal-bestseller-lists/